Democracy or What's Right?

[Furunculus]

Aha! This is the nub of it. The point of the poll is that democracy is an end in itself. The self governance of the people.

*Toryism. The belief that "Real England/Britain" is the character of the landowning classes and those who support them.

Since i start from the position that the aim of democracy geovernment is to achieve representation of the people the first option; The primacy of public opinion is paramount, make a lot more sense. There have after all been plenty of political systems that claim to be deomocratic without be representaive of the will of the people.

* in your opinion, to me it is the belief that individual freedom is a far healthier position that state imposed freedom.

[al Roumi]

It's an essay in evasion this thread. Trying to redefine democracy, going off piste entirely with talk of Stalin. And yet no-one has come up with anywhere near the number of democracies overthrown by leftists as democracies overthrown by rightists - in fact so far we haven't had one decent example.

Why not just say "yes, democracies have much more to fear from rightists than leftists" and then we can move on?

Essentially, you want to affirm a supposition you have that right wing people & groups are fundamentally undemocratic. I think you are the only person arguing that case in this thread. Furthermore, in the absence of evidence, you want to affirm your own opinion as fact!

Aha! This is the nub of it. The point of the poll is that democracy is an end in itself. The self governance of the people.

I think it is very easy to be confused by what democracy theoretically means and what it is in practice. Exactly as a totalitarian state can be left wing (furthering the interests of the poor/working class) and right wing (preserving the interests of the elite), so can a “democracy”.

Democracy only means a system of election of the people to rule the people. Under no circumstances does it alone ensure representative or responsive governance. To be so fixated on “democracy” as a system is frankly absurd –you don’t have to look far round the world to find corrupt, kleptocratic, un-representative and un-responsive “democratically” elected governments.

The single thing which democratic elections do contribute to representative and responsive governance is a (crude) system of accountability –if you don’t like the incumbent, don’t vote for him again! I say this is a crude system though because elections can be so open to corruption and influence that the accountability can be no more than a fig-leaf for decidedly un-representative, unresponsive and unaccountable governance.

That's an interesting discussion we could have on another thread, but it isn't really material to this thread as Russia was a monarchy, not a democracy.

:wince: As I mentioned above, there was a February revolution before an October one in Russia. The February revolution, supported by the communists, deposed the Tsar’s absolute power and established an elected “democratic” government (middle/upper class dominated). The communists then proceeded to undermine this government and later in the same year provoked the October revolution –deposing the elected democratic government and imposing a communist one.

Stalin wasn't a lefty. He mainly did all he could for personal power and ambition. He wasn't even the leader of Russia (that was Mikhail Kalinin), shows you what he did for his own personal power.

Stalin must, at some level, have been motivated by the interests of the proletariat, ergo left wing. He would also quite clearly have been one to vote “2” in this poll…